by Dan E. Moldea
1995, William Mor­row & Co.
ISBN-10: 068808303X
ISBN-13: 978–0688083038
512 pages

Excerpt from Chap­ter One: On Fix­ing Games and Inside Infor­ma­tion

I once asked Pro Foot­ball Hall of Fame quar­ter­back Len Daw­son of the Kansas City Chiefs whether the fact that his team’s games had been taken off the bet­ting boards by book­mak­ers across the coun­try dur­ing the late 1960s was an indi­ca­tion that they were fixed. Daw­son replied, “It would be a dan­ger­ous thing to fix a game. To me, a player would be branded for life if he did that. His team­mates would express shock and anger. I don’t know how one guy could do it, even a quar­ter­back. In our sys­tem, we ran the ball a lot. Even when I wasn’t in there, it didn’t make much dif­fer­ence who was quar­ter­back, because the defense scored points to help win games.

“I sup­pose the quar­ter­back could put the ball on the ground, with turnovers in cru­cial sit­u­a­tions. It would cer­tainly have a bear­ing on the game. Hell, a kicker could have as much to do with it just by miss­ing. He has more con­trol over it than some­times the quar­ter­back does.”

Defen­sive back Dick “Night Train” Lane, for­merly of the Detroit Lions and also a mem­ber of the Hall of Fame, told me that while he was a player he was once approached by Don­ald Daw­son, the Detroit gam­bler who was later linked in a fed­eral probe with Len Daw­son, who was no rela­tion. Recall­ing the inci­dent, which he did not report to the NFL, Lane says, “Don told me, ‘Quar­ter­backs do a lot of bet­ting them­selves. Did you know that?’ I said [laugh­ing], ‘Get out of here.’ He said, ‘You know it can be done, Night Train. You’re the only man between the goal post and a receiver. You can slip and fall and let the guy score.’”

“The best book on the NFL’s con­nec­tion to the mob and the Amer­i­can gam­bling scene was Dan Moldea’s ground­break­ing Inter­fer­ence. Moldea tore apart the league’s papier-mache image and illus­trated that, with­out gam­blers, it would have remained on the sand­lots.”
- John L. Smith, Las Vegas Review-Journal

“Moldea has writ­ten per­haps the most impor­tant sports book in the his­tory of the lan­guage.”
- Keith Olber­mann, ESPN SportsCenter

THIS BOOK IS IN PRINT. Avail­able com­mer­cially. Learn more about Dan Moldea.